Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday October 09, 2011 @02:40PM
from the slightly-different dept.

An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from Examiner.com, citing a report at gagdet.ro, about Samsung's upcoming high-end Nexus Prime, the first phone to be delivered with Ice Cream Sandwich. "This version of the Nexus Series (Google's Android flag bearer) runs the next version of Android: Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. This version is meant to combine Honycomb (Android 3.0) with Gingerbread(Android 2.3) into one OS, that will run on all devices. In addition to the merger of the two OS's, it also changes the Android UI a bit. One major change, is that the icons and the UI is a lot more sophisticated and clean, making even iOS look old and clunky. Also, it removes the requirement for Android phones to have hard/soft-hard mixed buttons, in favor of allowing manufacturers to use whichever type of button they wish. Also, it adds a soft button on the lock screen, to go straight to the camera app."

I wonder if Google will finally release the source. They said they would fully open source Ice Cream Sandwich, but whether or not they will keep their promises remains to be seen.

My guess? They will say that the source will be "coming soon" for the next few years, until they release Panda Bear Turd or whatever the next OS will be called, never release the source, but people will forget or make excuses for Google as they have regarding their closed source Android 3 implementation.

Scrolling the screen pops new content up from "within" the device. That makes absolutely no sense. It's eye candy that detracts from usability.Not to be a fanboi, but the various animations in iOS serve to provide visual cues to the user on what is happening and how to use the UI. Apple is very up front in their UI guidelines about how animations should serve to inform the user on what is happening. This Android animation completely fails at that.

Even with 4.3" about three quarters of the population won't be able to reach all points across the screen with their thumb when using the phone one-handed without balancing it on three fingers. And not many people will like a phone that NEEDS both hands to use it.

Maybe I'm totally wrong, but honestly I think that these huge screens are totally idiotic if you really want to go mainstream with a phone. See, half of your potential customers are women (which tend to have smaller hands) and not too few will be teenagers.

And then have a line of three or four small buttons (on or off the screen) on the very bottom of the face and a screen that stretches 4.3 inches across to the top. Using this thing while walking and carrying something with the other hand is like eating soup with a fork.

And no, I'm not trolling here. These things are great for males with large hands or for geeks who usually sit down over anything resembling a computer anyway and would love it to have foot switches, too. But how can those companies just walk over the needs of major parts of the population and expect to be sucessful with this? I just don't get it. Or of course Google and Samsung are purposefully limiting their target group to a certain part of the population, because... yes, why would they do that? Any ideas?

No doubt. But still: Is NOT targeting the majority with your latest and greatest phone a wise move? I mean, this thing is meant to be THE Android Smartphone by Google(TM). Why not targeting it smack at the middle of the mainstream right up against the iPhone? How can you be successful if about all the Android phones that are better than "halfway usable" are fighting over the big-handed technophile geeks, leaving the majority of potential customers to either buy second rate cheap Android phones or an iPhone? How silly is that?

As The Onion headlined a few days ago: "Last American Who Knew What The Fuck He Was Doing Dies". How apt.

Honeycomb:
- Experimental. Rushed. Beta-quality. Embarrassment.
- Supports <1% of total Android devices.
- Deprecated within 1 year of release.
- No hacker community.
- No code contribution pledge. No history of open source.

Ice Cream Sandwich:
- Open source commitment made back in January/February of '11.
- Theoretically it supports most Android devices.
- All previous versions of handset OS were open source.

I only see ICS being closed if it's fundamentally broken in some way (UI design) or if it's alpha-quality crap competing with the iPhone 5. Personally I'll switch to iOS if that happens.

And then there are the Android app developers. Invariably they want access to my contacts, they want to impersonate me, they want real-time access to my GPS location, even for apps as simple as Droid Flashlight.

iPhone apps do the same, and you don't even get a chance to check what permissions apps use to decide which flashlight app to install (the one that does access your contacts, or the one that doesn't, hmm, tough choice:)